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How to Install and Uninstall Kodi 17 on Ubuntu 16.04

As far as home theatre PCs (HTPC) are concerned, few software match up to the open source Kodi. For those who may have known it in its early days, the name XBMC will definitely evoke nostalgia. So, just how popular is Kodi these days? The developer community is pretty impressive. As of writing, Kodi has 550+ contributors, who have together pushed close to 44,000 committs to the GitHub repo, and have released as many as 985 official add-ons. The official site also says that there are 246,000+ conversations on their forums, indicating a high interest among the users.

The best thing is, Kodi has just released version 17, their most stunning-looking and feature-loaded version to date.

So, what are some of the best features in Kodi 17?

The Estuary Skin interface gets an upgrade

Android de-interlacing (makes TV streams run better)

Amilogic ARM 4K support

DVD playback is now hardware-accelerated

Live TV and PVR functionalities are much improved.

Codenamed 'Krypton', the 17th iteration of Kodi is sure to please everyone, especially the open source users of Ubuntu 16.04.

Which leads to the logical question: How to install Kodi 17 on Ubuntu 16.04? Let's tackle that next.

Installing Kodi 17 on Ubuntu 16.04

Installing Kodi 17 on Ubuntu 16.04 is easy. Kodi has released an official PPA for Ubuntu, which you can add to your system as follows:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa

When prompted for password, enter the root password of your system.

After this, run this command, which will make sure that the contents of the PPA are indexed by your system:

$ sudo apt upgrade

And finally, it's time to install Kodi!

$ sudo apt install kodi

This will install the latest version (17, that is) on your system, and Kodi will then be available as an app to run on your system.

How to uninstall Kodi 17 from Ubuntu 17.04

In case you ever need to uninstall Kodi 17 from Ubuntu 16.04, you can do so by purging the ppa and the installation in one go:

$ sudo apt install ppa-purge && sudo ppa-purge ppa:team-xbmc/ppa

And just in case you want to remove only the app (because of a faulty install, maybe) but want to keep the ppa, run this:

$ sudo apt purge kodi

That's all! Installing and uninstalling Kodi 17 on Ubuntu 16.04 is very easy.